What Are Your Ethics?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 2, 2025
A bit over 10 years ago, I'd been working my way through a book titled The Ethics of Star Trek. I usually speedread books, but this one had so many concepts involved that, well, I won't say I struggled to get through it, but it was so detailed and compact that it became more of a love/hate relationship than anything else... and I still enjoyed it.

I might read it again someday
Of course, one can't talk about the ethics of Star Trek without talking about the ethics of the captains of each series, at least through Enterprise (I haven't watched any series after that) because leaders tend to set the basis for how everyone else within their community is going to act. Sure, there are always those people who will go against the grain, but in general, if people respect their leaders they're going to try to be more like them, and if they don't they're going to try to be less like them.
As a major of the Star Trek series and the movies in the 2000s, it was fun seeing and then comparing the different styles of each captain, and rating them from my favorite to my least. From my perspective, it's hard not to put Picard at the top of my list, and the newer Kirk at the bottom... even though I still liked him. Every captain had different issues to deal with; different situations, different goals and and different ways of coming to conclusions. Since every captain was totally in charge and isolated, they had to make the decisions needed to keep everyone safe and following the rules of their positions; that was definitely taxing.
When we compare what they had to do with what most business leaders do, the situations aren't close to being the same. Still, though most leaders and managers probably rarely think about it, they also have a lot of pressure that they have to bare.
It's no longer good enough to just be good as a leader, at a job for you were hired for. Leaders are required to be ethical when it comes to their personal lives as well, especially if there's the possibility that their behavior could damage the reputation of the company they work for.
We have many examples of that type of thing happening, from athletes to leading politicians to religious leaders to media moguls... all people who set themselves up as one thing only for us to learn that they were actually doing something totally different and unethical. Each time someone in the know is caught, the first thing they ask of everyone is to respect their privacy... which we never do. Once you've put yourself out there, privacy is nonexistent; you belong to someone else.
That's how it is with managers and leaders, which I see as separate entities. Most of them aren't big on the national stage, but they're big within their own little pond, as they have people reporting to them and are ultimately report to someone else, even if they're the owner of the company. The ethics they exhibit are going to determine their effectiveness long term, and one bad step and it could all be gone.
There's also the reality that if one's ethics have always been suspect that they might be able to get over. For instance, Don King, the former boxing promoter, always had ethical issues surrounding him, first from his conviction for killing someone when he was younger, then for some of the questionable boxing deals he's put together over the course of almost 40 years of promotions where almost every boxer he's ever represented ended up broke or filing for bankruptcy at some point once their fighting days were over.
He's one of the few who was able to bank on that particular reputation and continue to thrive at what he did because he never presented himself as anything more than what he was, that being a good boxing promoter. He's not alone; who do you think about when you hear of any type of leader who's violated the trust of both their employees and consumers?
In reading this book, and seeing how the author breaks down the ethics of each captain (at least the first four; the book was written before Enterprise came on TV), it's amazing how closely each one relates to the other when it concerns their ethics, and where all of them seem to draw the line. With each captain there was one ethic that took precedent over anything else; that was duty to the crew.
Treat your crew right and they'll follow you no matter what. None of them is perfect, but they wouldn't do anything that would make them look bad in the eyes of their crew or of Starfleet. They know the role they've accepted, and would rather die than breach those ethics.
As a leader, how are you putting forth your ethics as they pertain to your employees? If you need a refresher course, I'd recommend watching some Star Trek episodes. I'd recommend reading the book as well, but that might take some time.